Emerging Payment Technologies Will Create New Winners And Losers In The Giant Credit Card Industry

The credit and debit card ecosystem is much bigger than MasterCard, American Express, and Visa.

Scores of companies play different roles in the system as intermediaries, most of them as merchant-facing vendors that provide the technology and services that help businesses accept credit cards. Recently, Silicon Valley has decided they also want to compete in this market, and introduced online, mobile, and cloud-based services that compete with those provided by the legacy players.

The credit card companies themselves aren’t going anywhere for now.Visa and MasterCard in particular will remain an indispensable part of the chain because they don’t actually process payments. They simply provide the rails that the credit card system runs on. Credit card processors like First Data that actually do the work of processing merchants’ credit card transactions on the back-end are also in a strong position.